


ménage à, uh, quatre? this isn't adding up…

by AlexSeanchai (EllieMurasaki)



Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: Discussion of 3+somes, F/M, Identity Reveal, Queer Het, Season/Series 03 Spoilers, reference to bdsm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-30
Updated: 2018-12-30
Packaged: 2019-09-30 04:55:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,376
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17217380
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EllieMurasaki/pseuds/AlexSeanchai
Summary: "Ladybug and Adrien I can see," observes Marinette to Lila, her pink cheeks at odds with her tart voice. "But if we're envisioning them as two-thirds of a ménage à trois—" (Adrien refuses to die of blush; if Ladybug has to haul her partner's sorry ass out of the grave because he realized his most attractive classmate hasthought about this, the mortification will put him right back six feet under.) "—do youreallythink you have more to offer them thanChat Noirdoes?"





	ménage à, uh, quatre? this isn't adding up…

**Author's Note:**

> [My original three-sentence fic.](https://rthstewart.dreamwidth.org/139838.html?thread=5880894#cmt5880894) As you might gather, it got a bit out of control…
> 
> Find me on [Dreamwidth](https://alexseanchai.dreamwidth.org/) and [Tumblr](http://alexseanchai.tumblr.com/).

Lila saunters into the classroom fifteen minutes before the day's to start and waves a pair of movie tickets in Adrien's face. "Adrien, honey," she says brightly, "I got us tickets for Saturday evening to that movie you said you want to see!"

Adrien, mildly curious, catches her wrist just long enough to read the tickets. She is for once not lying (though he wonders where she heard of this), but aside from her sparkling personality and how he already has plans to be at an overlapping showing with Nino, nobody but Chloé is allowed to call him 'honey'. (Chloé is, fortunately for Lila, not yet present.) Adrien might make an exception for Ladybug, which is the only way he'd accept the endearment in a romantic sense, but then again Ladybug would probably take half a glance at Queen Bee and concede the point.

"You'll pick me up at six for dinner, right?" Lila coos.

Yeah, no. "I assume I should look for you in red spandex with spots," Adrien snaps. "Because I gotta tell you, if you're not Ladybug, it is not a date."

Lila is only briefly taken aback. "Oh, Ladybug _wishes_ she were dating _me_ ," she says airily. "Maybe you and she and I could do a threesome sometime."

Adrien is aware that his friends think he is the most oblivious person on the planet (though he hasn't discerned why), but he _has_ figured out that Ladybug continues to reject Chat Noir because Ladybug wants—for practical purposes, _only_ wants—Adrien. (And he is absolutely certain that, should Ladybug keep a list of people she might like to bang, Lila forcefully took herself off it. If Lila was ever _on_ it; she certainly barred herself from Adrien's such list in a hurry.) This is a thoroughly unhelpful line of thought, since he would not dare hand Hawkmoth's favorite accomplice such a weapon _ever_ , never mind while Ladybug herself remains sadly and determinedly unaware.

"Ladybug and Adrien I can see," observes Marinette to Lila, her pink cheeks at odds with her tart voice. "But if we're envisioning them as two-thirds of a ménage à trois—" (Adrien refuses to die of blush; if Ladybug has to haul her partner's sorry ass out of the grave because he realized his most attractive classmate has _thought about this_ , the mortification will put him right back six feet under.) "—do you _really_ think you have more to offer them than _Chat Noir_ does?"

Adrien stares at Marinette for way too long, Lila's disbelieving noises be damned. "Ladybug doesn't _want_ Chat Noir," he counters when he has picked his jaw back up from around knee level. "She has made that most clear."

Also: great, now Adrien is going to be fending off teasing about his blatant crush on Chat Noir. And possibly about how he totally needs to ask Ladybug out ASAP, which is fundamentally unfair because he _has been_. And while maybe he should try without the mask (though then again, given her expressed concerns about the safety of their assorted loved ones, maybe he should continue to not), he point blank refuses to hide himself behind his father's expectations of appropriate conduct when he does.

But—hm. Marinette is bisexual, or anyway she has said so in public to draw fire off Rose and Juleka, a display of courage to which Adrien—who has long since decided to put off any admission of his own queerness until his father cannot hurt him for it, unless Ladybug needs Adrien's visible support—aspires. So is Ladybug; she and Chat Noir have both said as much on the record. Nor is this the first time Adrien has noticed Marinette blushing through a conversation about Ladybug's fantasized sexual escapades, so he's willing to bank on her crushing on Ladybug like every other female-attracted person of good taste in Paris, and he knows Ladybug has met Marinette before and he can't say they instantly got along like a house on fire but at least he's reasonably sure Ladybug did not immediately take a disliking to her. And Lila is not subtle about loathing Marinette.

Adrien gives Marinette a deliberately slow smile. "How about her, me, and _you_?"

Marinette sputters, folding in on herself, hiding her face—

Oh fuck fuck _fuck_ if Marinette's remarkable streak of rolling willpower saves against akumatization breaks because _he publicly humiliated her_ he will have to ask Ladybug to end his miserable existence. (She'll refuse, which will be worse, but frankly he is earning that.) Adrien leaps to her side. "I'm sorry," he says, heartfelt. "I shouldn't have said that—forget I said anything? Or—or just punch me and get it over with?"

She drags in a deep steadying breath and lets it out again, then looks up at him with a hesitant smile at odds again with her sharp tone. "What, and break your pretty face? Pig."

"Oink," says Adrien guiltily, then admits, "I wish you would. It'd have the nice side benefit of getting me out of tonight's photoshoot."

Marinette laughs, bright and honest. (He can hear their classmates shushing each other, mostly excitedly though Juleka is threatening to gag Lila "and not in the fun way", and Rose's delighted squeal of "it's finally _happening_!" He bets at least one of Nino and Alya are filming.) "Can't miss that."

She pauses.

"You've thought about this." Her voice is very small. "You, me, and her."

"You've thought about this," Adrien responds. "Her, me, and him." It is certainly a pretty picture, but where does Marinette fit in?

Marinette snorts. "It is impossible to deny that man's attractiveness." Adrien suddenly feels very warm. "Though he would be more appealing if he were less convinced he's the gods' gift to the male-desiring half of Paris."

…That is not the effect he is going for. There is not actually much Adrien can or dares do about his reputedly pretty face, and, while achieving his fine musculature was not deliberate, reducing that strength is not permissible; Chat Noir cannot risk letting Ladybug down. He promptly resolves to tone down the charm.

"I didn't know you like Ladybug," Marinette continues, audibly trembling. "Does she know?"

Good deflection, E for effort. Adrien puts a daring and hopefully encouraging hand on her knee, and gives the answer he can publicly admit to. "Nah. She'll just think it's another celebrity crush, anyway."

Which is, Adrien abruptly realizes, the exact reason why Marinette is not currently speaking of _Adrien Agreste's_ attractiveness. (Probably. It is not impossible that as Adrien, he is too—restrained?—to appeal to her. It is simply, given her wall art, unlikely.) And while _he_ considers Marinette a friend—in both his faces—and would actually (it is now occurring to him) love to date her, conditional of course on his finding a way to feel he is neither betraying Ladybug nor treating Marinette as second-best? He isn't sure she _knows_ that.

Marinette's studying Adrien's hand in the hush.

Adrien swallows, considers how Ladybug would probably appreciate if he stopped trying to meaningfully flirt with her, and decides to go for broke. "Truth is, Marinette, if Ladybug hadn't knocked me on my ass before we met, I think I would have fallen for you."

Marinette goes very still.

He doesn't like the quality of this silence. The classmates paying attention are anticipatory, except for Lila's muffled protests, and Marinette is—what, shocked? Dismayed? Maybe a little more truth might help? "Hell, I might yet."

She visibly steels herself, then lays her own hand on his, covering his ring. "Yeah, she was madly clumsy at first, wasn't she?"

—Adrien does not know by how much Ladybug's existence predates Chat Noir's, if it does at all. Only that he met her very shortly after he met Plagg, and they made their public debut simultaneously. Marinette has no way to know the parts of that that aren't public record. It is entirely plausible that Ladybug met Adrien _as Adrien_ before Adrien met Marinette or, quite possibly, Ladybug met Chat Noir. It is also entirely false, though as yet Adrien has voiced no lie, but Marinette cannot know that either—

—There were no observers in earshot of their actual meeting. Besides Chat Noir, only Ladybug herself could possibly know the exact words she used that day. And therefore only Ladybug and Chat Noir would find any significance to the phrase—

—Marinette is brushing her hair back from her ear. She has worn those earrings every day Adrien has known her. Just as he has worn this ring. Her earrings are plain black cabochon studs, but then his ring is only a wide silver band—

—This is not how he envisioned this moment.

But of _course_ she's her. Who else could she be?

"Both of them were," Marinette adds.

This has gotten _far_ too serious to continue in this vein with an audience, and also Adrien has never given thought to how to ask someone out when they're not both masked up. Distraction time, then. He draws some of his Chat mannerisms out of their usual concealment, hoping she will react as Ladybug typically does, and cheerfully sacrifices some more of his straitlaced reputation.

"Soooo." When Marinette meets his eyes, Adrien grins. "Foursome?"

And bounds out of the way of her thrown punch. "Pig!" Marinette shouts, but he can tell she's struggling not to laugh. "Toad! Tomcat!"

"Please," Adrien says as he leaps over a desk, without feeling or feigning shame, however much he must tamp his joyful exuberance for the audience. " _I_ am a _lion_."

(He belongs to _Felis_ , not _Panthera_ , for very good reason, though he might have liked a word with his subconscious before it made that decision. That is not his point.)

" _You_ are ly _ing_! Hold still so I can hit you!"

Adrien dodges out the door. " _I'm gonna be a mighty king,_ " he sings, " _so enemies beware!_ "

" _I've never seen a king of beasts,_ " retorts Marinette in a perfect deadpan that lets him know just how close behind him she is (his legs have always been longer but she has always been faster), " _with quite so little hair._ "

"Hey, no fair, you're Nala!"

He crashes to the floor—she must have knocked his feet out from under him; she's kneeling on his back and twisting one arm behind his spine. "Ha," she says. "Pinned ya."

Adrien considers whether he actually wants the embarrassment of reenacting the next bit of this scene, or the callback later in the movie. The following duet would be fantastic, but, again, far too intimate for this setting. With his free hand he taps out.

Marinette gets off him, lets him roll over, offers him a hand up. "Did I hurt you?" she asks.

"Sadly, no," says Adrien, accepting the assist. "Seriously, you should hit me in the face. I have better things to do tonight than that photoshoot." He smirks down at her, Chat-like, and her unimpressed expression tells him she heard the _Like you_ he refrained from voicing.

"I don't know," says Marinette, "I don't think I'm comfortable entering a BDSM relationship with you with zero negotiation and before we have even kissed."

That provokes laughter from the various classmates who followed to watch the show. Adrien himself clasps his hands at the small of his back where his baton belongs, pointedly looks at her hip where her yo-yo belongs, and gives her a long level stare.

Marinette huffs, but before she has found any other socially appropriate response, Alya starts a song playing: " _Percussion_ " and a calypso beat, " _strings_ " and the first instrumental part—

He is almost offended at being compared to Ariel's Prince Eric. Now _there_ is an oblivious man. "How many cameras are out?" Adrien asks everyone without taking his eyes from Marinette's. "'Any' is an answer that bars all kissing."

"I don't want anyone watching even if no one's recording," says Marinette, clearly equally unwilling to look away. "See you tonight?"

Adrien snorts. "I do not have a good enough reason to get out of—"

" _Alya_!" Juleka shrieks from the classroom. "Ladyblog, SOS, akuma, Lila!"

" _Shit_!" exclaims Adrien, and Marinette with him. It's _Lila_. How could they _forget_?

—Their classmates are already moving to block Lila's anticipated path. "She'll be after you both," says Nathaniel. "Get lost. We'll cover you."

"Thanks," Adrien says, heartfelt, and turns to run after Marinette.

She's holding a closet door open for him. He closes it behind them. "Can I watch?" he asks, breathless and astonished and delighted.

"I'll show you mine if you show me yours," Marinette purrs, pink-cheeked, which, uh, _wow_. All Ladybug's confidence and passion, pointed straight at him now that he is no longer impeding himself as her romantic prospect of choice, and with far less restraint because she is comfortable around Chat Noir as she (it is now obvious) never was around Adrien—good _gods_ all his dreams just came true.

Adrien grins. "Plagg, claws out!"

Marinette, eyes shining, pulls half a disapproving face. "You had that down pat before you ever _met_ Plagg."

"Guilty as charged, my lady," says Chat Noir.

She laughs. "Tikki, spots on!"

(After Ladybug and Chat Noir deal with Lila's akumatization—he is giving serious consideration to kidnapping the young woman to bait Hawkmoth out, since the two seem so fond of each other, but he already knows his lady won't go for it—and bolt to 'check on the akuma's targets' before anyone can ask them any embarrassing pointed questions, Adrien and Marinette slip back into their classroom, hand in hand. "BDSM?" Alya asks Marinette, arms folded and eyebrows raised, "—wait, no, kissing deets!" to which Marinette blushes, possibly because there are no kissing deets and, given the givens, they can't admit that. Adrien, visions of Ladybug as domme in a suspension bondage scene dancing in his head—he will tell her this later and he fully expects that she will either say he is banned from the internet or threaten to throttle his father for leaving him for so long with no significant human interaction off the internet, but he bets inside of six months she, by which he means they both, will be comfortable enough to attempt it with him—replies "No comment.")


End file.
